My baby’s heart is turned around
backwards in her chest. Her sister’s heart
has five holes where holes don’t belong.
My grandkids, I mean.Your daughters,
not mine, and the woman’s you married.
When they’re asleep you and I step outside
to two chairs on a damp square of patio
under a nest tucked into the eaves drinking
wine you buy at Costco not wishing
to confound me by serving costlier bottles.
Across the street will step a deer with a broken
leg you say and sure enough here it hobbles one
knee in the air the foot dangling like the evening
bags I once carried. In addition you say there’s
a boy across the street all grown up with half
a heart who walks mornings and evenings
he and the babies sharing the same
cardiologist, the boy being in other ways
just like the babies simply by living
on the same street.The girls rustle up their
bedclothes between us in their intercoms
their stuffed lambies beside them where toys
don’t belong but you already know
I’m not saying that. I didn’t used to listen in
when you were my baby boy your heart big
as a walnut the wounds it might someday
carry already practiced at sounding their
cries but you already know I’m not
saying that too. I wonder whether
there are babies born with two
hearts just as you say you’re of two
minds about it.
The wine, you mean.
Some nights it tastes not as great
as it should and on other nights
greater. I raise a glass to the eight
hour drive I made getting here and then a
second glass to pouring a second glass.
I’m of plural emoticons about it.
Driving, I mean.
Some days driving down
I’m so hemmed in by semis I’m half
out of my mind and on other days
out of somebody else’s
heart, I fear. The bird pedals at air
not liking to nest so near
to our drinking nor daring to back much
farther away and abandon its unhatched
to our libations. Strapping into my car
day after tomorrow I’m thinking
maybe I’ll kidnap one of the
intercoms so as to hear you
rinsing cups then your wife soothing blankies
her care in arranging all misplaced toys her
tucking in of all lambies
where lambies belong.
When I get home I call you up to tell you I’m home.
This is your rule.
The bird back on its nest the boy across the street
a man now toddling rather awkwardly
as if balancing a half glass of milk in one
hand and in his heart a fresh wound just as all
wounds are fresh and in the left hand
an egg. I tell you the road was the same boring
rainy long road as always except for the hole
I found in my leg the leg of those old
linen trousers I wore when we sat drinking
wine the fabric slashed so neatly
open that when I’ve stitched it back up
there’s a seam like the trickle
of drops of spilled milk I tried rinsing
one day from the girls’ two delicate post-op
chests that turned out to be
scars, not milk,
I found. The scars are beautiful I say and you
think so too, scars just like spilled trickles of
droplets of milk. They belong there,
we mean.
Abby Frucht has lived for thirty years in Oshkosh and recently retired from twenty-five years teaching at the low residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. An Iowa Short Fiction Prize winner, she has published eight books of fiction, numerous essays, and Maids, a book of poems.